Welcome to the first AI Maker monthly Q&A recap for Maker Labs members.
There will be more of these, but I want to be honest about this first one because I am still figuring out the format.
One of the things I want to offer paid members this year is more access to how I think through real questions in real time. The polished tutorials and finished frameworks in my regular newsletter posts are still useful, but I also want to share more of the messy middle where someone asks a question, I share what I am currently seeing, and we use that as a way to uncover what is actually useful.
This first session was mostly Q&A. I answered submitted questions, shared my screen, walked through parts of my AI stack, and talked through decisions that usually stay behind the scenes.
Future sessions might look different. They could become live demos, tool reviews, workflow teardowns, or sessions where I review what members are building.
I am treating this first session as a starting point and a way to gather feedback on what actually helps you learn and apply AI.
And to be honest, I already like this Q&A session.
The questions pushed me into places I do not always cover in a normal newsletter post. How I think about making money in AI. What is inside my current AI stack. How I maintain my own CLAUDE.md file when using Claude Code. Why I think prompt libraries are useful, but limited. What I would tell someone trying to grow on Substack without depending on one giant master prompt.
But if I had to boil it down to a single most important thing for this month’s session, it would be the idea of building your own context management with an AI agent. AI is already so good at understanding intent; what it doesn’t have is everything related to your work, how you think, and the constraints you operate under.
That realization came from the questions paid members asked:
Hema’s question about Substack growth pointed to the need for better audience and positioning files.
Tom’s question about Claude Skills pointed to the workflows Claude should remember.
James’s question about CLAUDE.md pointed to the instruction file that keeps evolving as your work changes.
Raj’s question about starting a new project pointed to the folders and source material you need before AI can help well.
Simon brought the business side into the same conversation.
And Ben asked about my current AI stack, where I showed all the AI tools I’m currently subscribed to.
So the direction is less about finding the perfect prompt and more about building the context files around your work.
That might mean a small folder of past work. It might mean a file that explains your audience. It might mean a simple instruction file that tells Claude how you make decisions. It might mean turning one repeatable process into a Skill so you do not have to remember the steps every time.
I hope you can learn even more from the questions other members are asking and adapt those insights to your own situation.
At the end, I also included a short survey because I want your feedback on what this monthly member format should become.
Now, let’s dive into each of the questions here
Hema: What should a master prompt for Substack growth include?
This month’s session started with Hema’s question about a master prompt for Substack growth.
The context matters here.
Hema is a coach building across Instagram, LinkedIn, and Substack. She wants to understand what kind of content lands with her audience, and eventually she wants to add a paywall.
So the surface-level question was about a master prompt.
But the deeper question was really about how to help AI understand her business well enough to give useful content advice.
My first instinct was to show the prompt side of it. I have a paid post on turning Claude into your brain’s most valuable co-worker, and that post includes a master prompt people can adapt.
But as I talked through the answer live, I kept coming back to the part that matters more now:
The prompt is only the steering wheel. The files are the engine. But this doesn’t mean that prompt is no longer important. I still use prompts. I still think a clear prompt matters.
But if your entire AI setup depends on one giant prompt, the model has to relearn your world every time you ask for help.
That becomes fragile fast.
So for Hema, I would not start by trying to perfect one master prompt for Substack growth. I would start by building a small folder of source material that tells Claude what is true about her work.
For a coach building across multiple platforms, I would create a few simple files:
